[Talk-us] Tiger Data 2007

[Alan Brown]

Here's the specific issue near my home near downtown San Jose that could be an issue - which is an example of a problem that could happen elsewhere.

There was an area with some residential streets that had serious flooding problems.  The government came in, installed some levees, tore out some houses and streets, and turned it into a park.  These were real streets, but they not longer exist.  However, they were in the last TIGER import.  I deleted several of them.

When that data is imported - how will you know that a missing road was intentionally deleted from OSM, or simply missing from the dataset?  If they reappear, it would be rather irritating to me.  It's not "overruling" me, in the sense that the old geometry no longer exists for you to see that I've editted it.
You could merely import changes to TIGER - that would be part of being "paranoid" - and that would address this situation. 

Another consideration:  what if someone spent a few weeks editting OSM data, went on to other concerns for a few months, without monitoring this group, and came back to make more changes?  Just because they haven't been watching everything happening with their section of the map, it doesn't mean they're not an important contributor.  I haven't bothered to see what's happened to the map data in the small village where I grew up - it was small enough that a couple hours editting did the trick.

OSM should place it's biggest bets on user contributions of local knowledge, rather than data imports - that's what differentiates it from Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ.  Just keep that in mind.

-Alan






________________________________
From: Dave Hansen <dave at sr71.net>
To: Alan Brown <adbrown1967 at yahoo.com>
Cc: talk-us at openstreetmap.org
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 3:52:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Talk-us] Tiger Data 2007

On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 15:46 -0700, Alan Brown wrote:
> If those 10% are located where someone has poured their heart into
> making a carefully constructed map - you could disillusion some of
> your most active contributors.

Yup, I completely agree.

But, one of the nice things is that the active contributors are the ones
that tend to read mailing lists and see the OSM site regularly.  They
should be the easiest to contact and be the most flexible about finding
the best ways to get this data imported.  If somebody "owns" 95% of the
edits in a county, I don't really *ever* think it is OK to overrule
them, certainly not in some automated way.

But, we surely have to distinguish those users from the ones that popped
up, moved one road in potlach to match Yahoo, and were never heard from
again.

-- Dave


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